Research Report in 30-Cent Novel

Group 11

KONG CHEUK YAN 11330113

XIE YITING 11322116

LAM YU 11330187

LAU PUI TUNG 11330448

LEE KIT TING 11321617

LIE YUET WAI RAISSA 11321928

The purpose of investigation

The origin of 30 -cent novel

Between 1950 and 1960, 30-cent novels were published in the mid-1990s. 30-cent novels were popular leisure reading at the time because of their low cost. However, the public did not regard it as a literary reading at the time because of its trashy content. 30-Cent novels weren't seen as having local qualities till a later time. In recent years, booksellers have auctioned off 3o cents works for hefty sums of money and turned them into scholarly research projects. Its literary merit is evidently not cheap.

Unlike other literary works like prose and novels, the 30-cent novel is quite unique, hence our group will select it as the research object. Despite being only 12 pages, the information is compelling. This week, our group focused on the ABC series of works by 30-cent novel. We discovered that these series' books are all about urban desire and love. Women's status is even more lowly or lowly among them. Therefore, by locating relevant entries portraying women's figures and personalities in the ABC series of novels, we seek to grasp the perception of women.

Research Methodology

(Scanning of Texts and Selection of Relevant Materials)

In order to find out the image of women in the 1950s and 1960s in the ABC Fiction series, we scanned the pdf images of each of the 26 fiction books into text files and went through a simple proofreading process. Then, our group selected the entries that described the woman's body, personality, etc., from the 26 novels. After that, we entered them into an Excel sheet for subsequent statistics.

（Data entering and presentation)

In the part of organizing the summary of the novels, we categorized the characters by their gender and description first. Therefore, we could enter the summary into the Excel sheet. With the help of the above data, we can search the related sentence by the characters' names.

（Data entering and presentation)

As we would like to analyze the image of women in the 30-cent novel, we focused on searching the sentences and keywords related to the female characters.

After we entered the description, we analyzed the keywords according to the summary and grouped them together.

We could decide what should be our keywords after we scanned for the summary. We used high-frequency adjectives for women as the keywords and search them in the text by using the search function. So that, we could find out the related sentences by the keywords.

To view a large number of sentences clearly, we set the keywords as the criteria and highlighted the sentences.

The sentences describing the females' character

This is the Excel table of the sentences containing the keywords about the women's character

The sentences describing the females' body

The highlighted function filtered the sentences we needed.

The filtered function could count the number of keyword occurrences quickly. Therefore, the data can be presented in the following charts by these data.

The ratio of the characters' gender

From the pie chart, we could see the male characters counted 68.6% of the total and the female characters only counted 30%. Although the number of male characters is double the number of female characters, most of the stories were driven by female characters. The female characters are few but vital in 30-cent novel.

The investigation result of women's image

Throughout the research, we found that the overall image of women in society at that time was very humble through the description of women's characters, figures, occupations, etc. in the novels. In Asia, the social status of men has always been the highest, and the right to speak is in the hands of men, as we all know. However, our understanding of the image of women is only low and has no right to speak, but for women's life and work at that time, and for men in society at that time, what kind of existence is a woman?

First of all, in the content of many novels, there are many female characters in each work. We counted about 209 women in the novels. More than 90% of the age group of women are young, and the occupations of women in the novel are pornographic industries, which use the body as a tool to make money, such as girls, dancers, courtesans, and mistresses. Women of the above occupations appear most frequently in novels, and are also considered by men to be dissolute and attractive. As for the female images of nurses, actors, etc., there are no more than 5 in the novel.

In Chinese society, morality is very important, and there are certain norms for women, such as being kind and being a housewife. However, not only are the women in the novel not these traditional images, they are also men's mistresses, and some female characters have sex with other different men after their husbands die. These behaviors are not sanctioned in traditional society. So what does all of the above mean? How does it reflect the image and status of women at that time?

The investigation result of women's characters

In the study of novels, for the description of female characters, we first found 26 common keywords describing female characters from these novels, and then found 264 sentences with keywords in each work for analysis Statistics, and we have a total of. According to our statistics, women's characters in novels are more negative, and more than 80% of the character descriptions involve "sex".

Among the 26 keywords we selected, there are negative adjectives as well as positive adjectives. Of course, there are very few positive adjectives. Among them, "Delicate" and "Charm" appear most often. In Chinese, "Charm" is not a good word, but refers to a woman's temperament that is sexy and seductive to men. Secondly, "Lewd" appears quite a lot. The women in the book are all open-minded, and those who actively seduce men are images of slutty women, which are completely different from the images of traditional Chinese women.

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：銷魂的 (Bewitching)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：嬌媚、憐弱 (Delicate)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：嬌豔、美好、可愛 (Charm)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：淫蕩、輕浮 (Coquettish)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：誘惑 / 迷惑人的 (Alluring)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：淫蕩 (Lewd)

Items describing female personalities

Female’s character：瘋狂 (be crazy about sb/sth)

From the above texts, we can see that in different novels, there are different descriptions of female characters. However, these shaping of women's personalities have given them an open, sexy, and slutty character image, and their tone of voice is charming and sexy, and they are the characters who actively ask men for sex. A person's character can be revealed from their actions, tone of voice, and clothing. The content of the novel is to describe women's charming and sexy movements and laughter. This description of women's characters is quite different from what Asians think of women's characters.